Beyond Seamlessness: Mobile AI and Situated Sense-Making

This commentary explores what it means for generative artificial intelligence (AI) to become mobile, as interaction shifts from screen-bound querying to AI participation in the flow of everyday situations. Rather than framing this shift in terms of access or use, it approaches mobile AI through situated sense-making, understood here in terms of the constitution of sense through ongoing activities, embodied cues, social coordination, and mobile communication affordances as AI becomes part of the situation. Starting from a café interaction staged in a promotional video for a future AI device, the commentary confronts corporate claims of seamless interaction with theoretical accounts of situated sense-making. Drawing on mobile communication studies and human–machine communication (HMC), it argues that mobile AI requires a specification of sense-making as HMC's central boundary object: not only as mutual interpretation between users and interfaces but also as a process embedded in ongoing activities and interactions. The commentary develops this argument through three interrelated aspects of situated sense-making—coordination, distribution, and stabilization—showing how mobile AI may reshape participation, redistribute epistemic authority, and steer relevance toward either shared problematization or premature closure. It thereby advances an approach to analyzing and designing embodied AI that foregrounds visible coordination, responsive alignment, and stabilization that remains open to collective deliberation.